Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard: Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department

Easy as one-two-three

As far as songwriting output goes, one full-length album per year is a brisk pace. Two qualifies you as an eccentric, prolific artist. Three means you're Robert Pollard.

First, a solo album, Kid Marine; then Do the Collapse, with his band Guided by Voices; and now Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department, a collaboration with GbV guitarist Doug Gillard. This has been a banner year for Pollard, who's proven—as if he needed to—that he's still one of the best songwriters out there. Speak Kindly is one of the year's best releases.

After a successful foray into ultra-clean production on Do the Collapse, one of the weirdest "conventional" rock albums in recent memory, Speak Kindly is closer to Pollard's home-recording roots, though he refuses to rehash the GbV lo-fi classics of the mid-'90s. Instead, it's an amalgam of Pollard's recent trends. Speak Kindly contains fully fleshed-out ideas while maintaining the complex, abstract structures of his prog-rock influences. And, as always, pop. "The Frequent Weaver Who Burns" and the aptly named "Pop Zeus" are exemplary of Pollard's wonderfully skewed view of what's catchy. In what may be the album's most shining moment, "Tight Globes" is a power-pop masterpiece, without either verse or chorus. Instead, it dabbles around in the main melody for two minutes before Gillard finishes it off gloriously with an all-out guitar solo.

As with most of Pollard's best work, however, some of the greatest songs on Speak Kindly are those that initially elude the ear. The minute-and-a-half "Soul Train College Police Man" is a mini-anthem in the best GbV tradition: he hits you majestically with the song's title only three times, and before you know it, the next song has started. He winds his way through the quiet lyrics of "Larger Massachusetts" so unassumingly that you barely notice as he segues into the soaring, achingly beautiful chorus: "The medium-sized world is making a comeback/the world at large is drowning/disappearing/crawling up and out forever."

As Pollard deftly moves between arena-rock power ("Slick as Snails") and lo-fi charm (the couplet of "Soft Smoke" and "Same Things"), he exercises his songwriting muscles to stunning effect. Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department is arguably his best work in years, and in no small part due to Gillard's contributions. If this album is any indication of what is to come for Pollard and Gbv, the next millennium will be a very good one indeed. (Recordhead/Rockathon)

—Sam Engel

Back to A&E...